FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT BOSNIAN - PAGE 4

The wounds of war were still bitterly fresh on the summer morning that two 45-year-old women met in their apartment building's gray, run-down lobby. They spoke softly near the mailboxes, in the language of Bosnia, the Serb and the Muslim. They talked about children and starting over, about war and a magical place called Wal-Mart, about bombs and grenades and forgiveness. Later that day they shared coffee, thick and dark and tasting like home, and soon it became an end-of-the-day tradition.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman (upper right) arrives in the Sarajevo Tuesday on his first official visit to the Bosnian capital. Tudjman met with his Bosnian counterpart, Alija Izetbegovic, and the president of the new Muslim-Croat federation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kresimir Zubak. According to Croatian radio their talks involved the establishment of the Bosnian federation and its possible confederation with Croatia.

A French UN peacekeeper monitors the unloading of a Canadian cargo plane in Sarajevo Tuesday as the international airlift that supplies the besieged Bosnian capital with most of its food resumed, 2 1/2 weeks after it was shut down by sniper fire. Meanwhile, thousands of civilians and soldiers loyal to a renegade Muslim leader fled northwestern Bosnia for Serb-held parts of Croatia as government forces crushed remaining resistance. Success in the Bihac pocket, where rebel Muslim Fikret Abdic had allied himself with Serbs against the Bosnian government, would be the biggest victory for the Bosnian army in 28 months of war.

A knife-wielding Bosnian refugee facing deportation hijacked an Austrian Airlines jetliner Tuesday but was disarmed by police commandos who secretly boarded and pushed him out an open door. Police said the 39-year-old Bosnian, whose permit to live in Germany is to expire next Tuesday, fell about 21 feet to the tarmac at Tegel Airport, where he was overpowered and detained. None of the passengers or crew was hurt or threatened during the hijacking and, despite their ordeal, 21 passengers flew on to Vienna hours later.

Street cars rumbled and traffic lights glowed in Sarajevo Wednesday as electricity was restored after 13 days, but a Serb squeeze on the Bosnian capital kept tensions high. UN officials reported 1,500 shooting incidents in the previous 24 hours and said they were investigating the firing of a pair of mortars, apparently by Bosnian government forces, at the Serb-held suburb of Ilidza.

A Croat advance that stunned rebel Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia eased Tuesday, but the lull appeared temporary: The Serbs announced an impending counteroffensive, and the United Nations said the Croats had "fully prepared" for war. About 10,000 Croat troops driving north in Bosnia have taken hundreds of square miles of rebel Serb-held territory. As they push closer to the Croatian border, they are increasingly threatening Knin, headquarters of rebel Serbs in Croatia. The Croat advance, which accelerated last week, is taking place under the auspices of a military pact between the Croatian and Bosnian government.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati discussed military support for the Bosnian government's battle against separatist Serbs in talks with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic Monday. Velayati and Izetbegovic also called again for the exemption of Bosnia from a UN arms embargo on ex-Yugoslavia and criticized the Big Power "contact group" which is trying to reach a peace agreement in Bosnia. Velayati earlier met the foreign ministers of Croatia and Bosnia to convey the Muslim world's support for their war to recover breakaway Serb territory and briefed them on a move by Islamic nations to "invalidate" the embargo.

"I just don't want to see defense wrecked." -Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; expressing his view that the defense budget should not be raided to increase support of domestic programs. "The demographics are different now." -The mayor of a formerly Muslim-majority eastern Bosnian town that has become almost exclusively Serbian.

Armin Balija, 5, a possible cancer victim, is carried by his mother towards a U.S. Air Force transport during a medical evacuation that began Monday. At least nine persons from the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo are being flown to the United States for treatment.

A war crimes suspect wanted by the UN tribunal for alleged atrocities committed during the Bosnian war died in a bar brawl in Serbia, police said Saturday. Slobodan Miljkovic was shot Friday night in a melee in his hometown of Kragujevac, 60 miles southeast of Belgrade, police said. Miljkovic, 36, was under indictment by the UN war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands in connection with war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out in the northeastern Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac in 1992.